Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday April 20, 2010 @03:18PM
from the you-asked-we-told dept.

D H NG writes "In the aftermath of Google's exit from mainland China, it had sought to be more open about what it censors. Google has launched a new tool to track the number of government requests targeted at Google and YouTube. These include both requests for data and requests to take down data. A quick look at the tool shows that Brazil is the top country in both categories (largely because Orkut is popular there), and information for China cannot be disclosed because 'Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets.' As part of its four-part plan, Google hopes to change the behavior of repressive governments, establish guiding principles for dealing with issues of free expression, build support online to protest repression, and better provide resources and support for developing technology designed to combat and circumvent Internet censorship."

It certainly isn't evil, but the number of requests really doesn't say a whole lot. How many were legitimate? Who exactly requested the takedown (FBI, NSA, CIA, local police, etc.)? Why was the request issued/granted? It's a step in the right direction and I hope to see them go further with it.

Well, according to their FAQ, they treat child porn separately and do remove it anyway, independently of gov. requests.And thus they don't include it in these statistic.So if they publish requests' PDFs, the child porn will be missing anyway.

Google is trying to keep its employees and former employees out of prison. You do realize that these requests made by the Chinese government were processed in part by Chinese employees of Google, yes? Well if Google airs all the requests in violation of Chinese law, guess who ends up in pound-you-in-the-ass prison? It's not Larry and Sergey. I'm glad that Google has conscience enough not to throw its current and former Chinese employees under the bus just to make political hay or accomplish a goal, however admirable that goal may be.

Your cherry-picked examples have vanquished me! Clearly this demonstrates that no peon(s) would be singled out to be made an example of for others who might be so bold as reveal state secrets. After all, China has no history of doing things like that.

Sometimes, staying neutral is pushing an agenda. It could be the agenda of making the almighty dollar at the expense of everything else. In this case, that agenda would be pushing the agenda of the Chinese government to oppress their own people. Google is merely saying that they cannot push their own agenda (of making money) if it also pushes an agenda they cannot agree to (censorship).

There is no neutral here. Either you support China's agenda by doing what they tell you, or you do not support China's

It's in part that exact attitude that allowed somewhere between 3 and 60 million (citation: Wikipedia article for "Joseph Stalin") people to die under the Soviet regime. How exactly do you expect an unarmed, suppressed peoples to take over an armed, trained, and extremely well-funded government? Sure, it happens sometimes, but rarely does it happen without external support or out-of-the-ordinary circumstances (say, like the bad government being based halfway around the world in the case of the US revolution, not to mention the French support).

From personal experience, the people in those oppressive regimes oftentimes root for the enemy. At least, I know this was the case in the Soviet Union and is the case in Iran.

So it's quite easy to say "It's not our culture, why do we have the right to fault them for silencing and killing their citizens," but in the end that's just a really lame way to avoid the reality: you're sitting by and doing nothing while people are being oppressed and killed. It doesn't necessarily make you evil, as there's nothing that necessarily obligates you to care, but it does make you less good than the people that are at least trying to do something about it. And in this case, in some tiny little way, Google is at least trying to do something.

So if Google's already shown if a state considers that information a state secret they'll recind publishing it, who wants to bet there will be a bill in Congress by tomorrow classifying it in the states too?

That wouldn't have much effect: due to the First Amendment, it's not actually illegal for third parties to republish classified information. It is a crime to leak it in the first place (so e.g. if you're a CIA officer and start mailing out documents, you can go to jail), but not to publish if you somehow get a hold of it [wikipedia.org]. So making it classified information wouldn't prevent Google from publishing their own statistics.

But it is illegal to violate a court's gag order. So watch as a new, automatic, clause is inserted in every single warrant to access Google's systems going forward. Something to the effect of establishing a gag order on the recipient of the warrant.

What exactly is your frame of reference here? Basically every state in the US has rural areas, even the smallest ones like Rhode Island and Delaware. The big ones like Montana and Texas are demographically similar to the way you're describing Canada, tons of small towns separated by miles and miles of sparsely populated land.

China’s censorship demands stop being “state secrets” and become public knowledge as soon as they give them to a private international US-based company, Google, and that company decides to publish them.

Hey China: Secrets are things you don’t tell people. If you want to secretly censor stuff, we can’t stop you, but you can’t tell us to help you censor stuff and at the same time keep it a secret.

The site is supposed to list Government requests - which would imply that it was a 'vs The Govt' type thing.

But if you count -any- court order, even those resulting from cases brought before the court by non-government entities, as being a government-issued order (as the courts are part of the government).. then sure. That would certainly skew the statistics.

What they DON'T show -- and I've sent feedback asking for -- is how many of these are legal demands, such as warrants or court orders, versus informal requests.

It looks to me like all the ones that are court orders have "court order" in parenthesis after the listing. So for Canada (as an example) there were 16 removal requests, two of which were court ordered.

Really? Is it possible for a profit motivated organisation to be benign?

If you buy a burger for lunch, do you consider the seller of the burger to be malign? Even though they probably turned up to either make a paycheck or profit rather than an altruistic desire to feed you that day? It is the normal course of most people's day to provide a good or service in order to make gain, whether they provide it to an employer or to the general public. It is generally considered the most likely way to persuade others to give you money is to provide some sort of value. Unless you can get

Do you give the burger seller more power over you than necessary? Are you willing to be the burger seller's product?

I have no problem with the concept of business. What worries me is businesses who gain power over governments while maintaining their for-profit motivations. As a motivation, for-profit isn't inherently malign, but it certainly is non-benign. As far as I can tell, nobody's even pretending that corporate motivations are benign, but we tend to lose sight of that when discussing the merits of the

I guess we can't have a completely free internet (Google self censors); however Google does work to have a mostly free internet except for where the majority of the worlds population would agree with them. If you are in a minority that believes Child Porn is OK and Hate speech is OK then you're out of luck. Other than that Google does seem to push back against the authority. I just hope they don't start self censoring morally ambiguous activities like sex and drugs.

as for china considering censorship requests to be state secrets: well of course it does. just like the church of scientology considers its sacred texts to be intellectual property. i mean, if you're going to be a controlling asshole, at least be true to the concept to the inevitable extreme of absurdity, right?

Schadenfreude moderation? Perhaps. Personally, I think it's funny for the same reason the following is funny:

I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to be an eclipse and tell the cave men, "If I have come to destroy you, may the sun be blotted out from the sky." Just then the eclipse would start, and they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh.

A quick look at the tool shows that Brazil is the top country in both categories (largely because Orkut is popular there)

The reason Brazil is the top country is not only due to Orkut's popularity, but because many Brazilian laws were designed to limit freedom of speech and free enterprise. Anyone remember this [slashdot.org]?

A significant part of these government requests is probably tied to lawsuits involving Adwords. In the past, companies have been sued and found guilty for using their competitors' names as keywords in Adwords, for example. This practice is perfectly legal in most countries, including the US.

I wonder if Google can make this popular enough to pressure countries into changing their laws.

I personally think it's very "amusing" to read the law where it says that freedom of expression is guaranteed but anonomity is forbidden. No anonimity boils down to no freedom of expression, because your freedom is limited by whatever the judge's interpretation of the law is.

Again, I really wish all these issues are brought to light by someone. Maybe Brazil is next in Google's crusade against censorship?

If you start to put countries laws into game, some interesting things could happen. What about content blocked becuase break some particular country patents/copyright/trademark laws? Would that put pressure in countries to change IP laws?What about showing nudity? And that, without even touching what one country or another could consider child porn, or forbidden practices by religion and/or law that could look innocent to you, dont know, like pork eating.not using veil or drawing Muhammad.

As a Brazilian, I'm glad this exposes a situation which isn't usually discussed but should be given more attention now that Brazil is trying to gain additional worldwide relevance (through G20 and all that).

Brazilian courts have been extremely unreasonable and have forced Google to hand over private information and take down pages without much fanfare. Even though none of the data is actually hosted in Brazil, the courts have fined and threatened to fine Google several times because of this.

In Brazil, service providers have liability for their users actions and there are laws protecting the "private image" of individuals (even celebrities). In effect, paparazzi can be sued around here. Journalists can be sued and bloggers aren't considered journalists. Writing a story denouncing a politician can get you a lawsuit.

All this mess accounts for a lot of these requests. Google isn't being evil, but I wish there was more international pressure against the Brazilian government.

Yes, also an US ambassador was kidnapped by a Communist guerrilla group in the 60s or 70s.

The fight between the military government (morally conservative but very pro-state intervention in economics) and it's opposition both democratic (mostly in the current Social Democratic Party, PSDB, the opposition) and the Communist guerrilla/syndicate leaders (the Workers Party, the current government) mostly shaped the contemporary Brazilian politics.

Anonymity is not allowed under Brazilian law because you have the right response on anything that was said about you, if what is published is different from reality. And I think it's quite fair...

You don't need to know *who* is saying bad things about you in order to be able to deny those things. You only need to know who said if you want some sort of revenge. When someone is publishing a story about a corrupt politician, what matters is the fact that he is corrupt, not who is publishing the story.

If Google pulls out and leaves China, what happens? I really don’t know. Are there Chinese people currently employed by Google? I suppose. Would they be in legal trouble if Google ditched them and left? They might. But I blame the Chinese government, not Google. It is not Google’s job to protect its Chinese employees from the tyranny of their own government. It is the Chinese people’s job to do that, and maybe if things get bad enough they’ll wake up and see this. And if things get R

You're on the right track when you say, "Google is a company, not a country." But when you turn around and say, "We don’t negotiate with terrorists," it seems like you're missing your own point. It is not for Google to ape US foreign policy or some kind of pseudo-national corporate sovereignty. Google must think about its employees in China because Google is not a government.

If something Google does results in its employees' imprisonment then a) that undermines the faith that Google employees place

Alternatively, fire all the Chinese employees for being "economically unviable", pull out of China, and publish a list of all of the Chinese employees (and their current status) so that when they start having "accidents", people notice. Follow that action with publishing all the crap that China doesn't want Google to publish, and making a global laughingstock of the Chinese government (not to mention potential international outrage and/or human rights investigations at what was being censored).

You really think that China is going to care who knows that they would imprison ex-Google employees for exposing state secrets? China WANTS people to know, especially their own citizens. It's called 'deterrence'.

Oh and the term you were looking for here is 'gwailo' (or 'gweilo') not 'gaijin'.

Israel has surprisingly few requests overall - 30 data and 10 removal requests - that's less than e.g. Canada on both counts! I would have expected that them to be be much more prolific with data requests, given their circumstances. I mean, it's a state for which "war on terror" is not an imaginary thing to scare voters into submission, but a very real part of day-to-day-life.

However, what's really weird is that only 20% of removal requests were complied with - and it seems to be the lowest figure overall (

As I read the blog post, I kept wondering, what if Google did this for corporate requests as well? Information on the number of, say, DMCA take-down requests that the highest requesting corporations or individuals have made would be cool to see. So would the number of successful counter-requests. They could include information from other countries too, if they have a similar system.

March 30, 2010: Mainland China blocks all Google service. The block only lasted a day.

Beijing used a lot of harsh words, but in the end Google and all their employee in PRC were not prosecuted and they continue to operate without censorship on Chinese soil. Google - 1, China - 0 so far.

March 30, 2010: Mainland China blocks all Google service. The block only lasted a day.

Beijing used a lot of harsh words, but in the end Google and all their employee in PRC were not prosecuted and they continue to operate without censorship on Chinese soil. Google - 1, China - 0 so far.

I'd like to be all snarky and groupthink, and throw out a "[citation needed]", but in all honesty, I'd just like links to verify the information. Yeah, yeah, I could "just google it", but why should I go to all that effort, when I haven't even bothered to actually read the article?

Today I had a notion that I can only wish might become viral. Since the Chinese government wants to censor web pages that critisize the Chinese government, the logical thing to do is to get some sort of criticism onto all possible web pages.

(Example criticism: "The Chinese government is run by cowardly barbarians. They are proved to be cowards because they are afraid to let their citizens have guns; they are proved to be barbarians because they think their political views are the only ones that matte

You are greatly exaggerating. Google explicitly states that it takes down material when, amongst other conditions, it violates local law. Google has to comply as much with local law as you and I - at home and when we are abroad.